For the librarians among us. If you are looking to get a head’s up e-mail of the upcoming challenge around the 15th of the month (ex. February announced on the list around January 15th), please e-mail me at bamchallenge{at}gmail.com. The reason you would be requesting this would be to prepare for programming, displays, etc. Include in your request: your name, position, and the name of the library you work for. You must agree to not reveal the challenge theme before the first of the month. If I find out you have revealed the theme early, you will be immediately removed from the head’s up list. If the list grows to more than 15 people, I will move it to an announcement-only/moderated Yahoo! group list. Any questions?

In the review itself, just talk about what you did and didn’t like about the book and how it related to the challenge.

Q2. Do audiobooks count as “reading”?

A2. Oh yes, they do. You can read whichever format is easiest for you: print, large print, audio or electronic.

Q3. Do I have to check back every month for the new challenge?

A3. While it would be really nice if you did, you can have the challenges sent to you one of two ways. Either subscribe to the posts using your favorite feed reader (ex. Bloglines, Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) or have it sent to you by e-mail using an RSS forwarding service such as RSSFWD.

**UPDATE: I’ve switched around the RSS feed to Feedburner, though the original feed should still be working fine. With putting the feed through Feedburner, there is now the easy option of having it sent to your e-mail.

Q4. Are we only allowed to read the books suggested in the challenge?

A4. As someone who has a poor history of actually reading books she was assigned in school, I would *never* presume to limit you! The books that will be listed in the challenges are suggestions only to get you thinking about the different ways a book can relate to the challenge. The relationship can be as superficial or as deep as you make it. If you need ideas, check out LibraryThing and do a tag search for the theme or by shelf name in Goodreads. Participants are also more than welcome to add their own suggestions in the comments.

Q5. Do I have to participate in every challenge?

A5. Again, while it would be really, really nice if you did, I know life has a way of sucking away precious reading time. Read what you can when you can. If you particularly like a past challenge, you can always comment later on in the original challenge post.

Wow. Day two and we already have 16 people signed up and a library asking if they can steal the idea.

Housekeeping Item #1:
If you work for a library that would like to steal the idea of the BAM Challenge, please feel free to do so. All I ask is you e-mail me at bamchallenge{AT}gmail.com to notify me what you’re doing, along with a link to your library’s website (info about the program preferred). Why? I want the BAM Challenge to grow into a great resource, and by having programs profiled, libraries can learn from each other and adapt great ideas for local use.

Housekeeping Item #2:
Comments are moderated. This is to ensure we don’t get nasty spam comments cluttering up the lists. However, once you’ve had one comment approved any further comments you make should automatically go through. So please, don’t post twice just because your comment doesn’t go through right away unless you have new information to add :) I encourage you to comment in the Sign Up post to get your approval out of the way.